Video Editor Skills for Claude Code

Video Editor Skills, a community set by GitHub user appariciojunior, has Claude transcribe your footage, cut retakes, false starts and dead air, keep your B-roll, and build a new timeline in your open DaVinci Resolve Studio project when you say "edit the new video". Claude reads the skills and writes the small scripts with you, for your camera and your Resolve template. If skills are new to you, read how Claude Skills work first.

License: free to use, not for anything sold

The LICENSE file puts the skills under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Above the legal text, the author sums it up in plain words, and says the legal text is what counts:

• You may use, copy, share and adapt the skills for free.
• You must give credit and link back to the repository.
• You may not sell them or use them in anything sold: paid courses, paid templates, or paid products or services built on them.

So if the edit is paid work for a client, or part of a course you sell, ask the author before you use the skills on it.

What the twelve skills cover

Claude picks what stays by word index, and a script turns that into frame-exact cuts. The pacing skill cuts from word timestamps, never from volume alone. The author's notes from real edits say a volume-only cut gave about 800 pieces on a 34-minute class, and the transcript cut gave 120. For vlogs, the pacing skill shortens any pause over 1.0 second to 0.6. Classes run tighter, at 0.5 and 0.3.

The safety rules are written into the skills. Claude never modifies raw footage, never touches your Resolve template or other projects (it only adds new timelines and clips), never prints API keys and never publishes anything without you.

What you need

• DaVinci Resolve Studio. The free version has no external scripting.
• ffmpeg, Python 3.9 or later, and a speech-to-text API that returns word timestamps.
• Optional: Epidemic Sound and Figma connected as MCP servers, and Node with Remotion for motion graphics.

How to install it

Clone the repository first. From its folder, copy the skills into your user folder, or into .claude/skills/ inside a project:

cp -R skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

The README also gives a plugin route, /plugin install <path-or-git-url-to-this-folder>, with the path or URL left for you to fill in. Then open Claude Code in an empty folder and say "set up my video editor". You create system/keys.env yourself, with your speech-to-text key on one line.

Example request

Edit the new video in raw video/. It's a [vlog / class] in [language]. Remove retakes and dead air but keep it feeling natural, keep the B-roll, and add a pink marker wherever I talk to the editor. Report each retake you removed with its timestamp.

Limits

• It's written against Resolve Studio 21, and the scripting skill warns that some API functions changed between versions 20 and 21.
• Subtitles go in by hand through File > Import > Subtitle in Resolve. The scripting skill says importing them by script crashed Resolve 21.1.
• Transcription is billed by your speech-to-text provider, so Claude asks before it re-transcribes.
• It's built for talking-head footage. The README names YouTube vlogs and classes.